Liszt's "Le mal du pays" (Homesickness), from Année de pèlerinage: Suisse.
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- Опубліковано 2 жов 2024
- My Liszt playlist, with other pieces from the Années de pèlerinage:
• Franz Liszt (1811-1886...
Thumbnail: View Of Lake Lucerne From Seelisberg (1862)
Alexandre Calame (Swiss, 1810-1864)
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Today we carry on with another of the pieces from Liszt’s Swiss Année de pèlerinage (Year of Pilgrimage). This has been a continuing series, so please take a look at my Liszt playlist for videos on the other pieces from the set: ua-cam.com/play/PLK_TADsOo16g2h5PHEw2eR7BW4kaZIZBC.html
This piece is one of the most fascinating of all the pieces in the Swiss collection, and is also a very clear forerunner of Liszt’s late style. The texture is sparse, the musical declamation is aphoristic, the gestures cryptic-there is a conscious avoidance of technical virtuosity. The emotional effect, however, is vivid and powerful. The title, “Le mal du pays” is a very characteristic French phrase: literally “The Sorrow of Country,” in English we would call it homesickness. Here Liszt is connecting the idea of nostalgia for home with the musical idea of the Ranz des vaches. The Ranz des vaches (literally, “rows of cows”), is a Swiss cattle call.
The Ranz des vaches in this piece is immediately apparent in the first 4 measures. It is a simple, open melody that outlines the tonic triad. When Liszt wrote this piece, the idea of the Ranz de vaches was already firmly part of the collective European imagination. As a romantic notion, it epitomized the love of the Swiss for their homeland. In fact, its power to produce feelings of nostalgia and homesickness on Swiss natives while abroad even led to its being supposedly forbidden for Swiss mercenaries in foreign countries. A large part of the romantic air that colored the average European’s view of Switzerland was informed by the Ranz des vaches. Naturally enough, the most prominent work of fiction in the early 19th century that epitomized this romantic view of Switzerland includes striking references to the Ranz des vaches. This was of course Etienne Pivert de Senancour’s quasi-autobiographical novel Obermann.
Although Senancour’s Obermann was directly referenced in the largest piece from Liszt’s Swiss Année de pèlerinage, “Vallée d’Obermann,” the ideas that it represents really inform the entire set. Before “Le Mal du pays,” Liszt includes a lengthy quotation from Obermann, which deals with the emotional world of the Ranz de Vaches. My own free translation of the entire quotation can be found in the reply to this comment. I highly recommend reading the entire excerpt before hearing the piece, as it is astonishing how vividly it conjures up the feelings and images inherent not only in this piece, but also in the entire cycle.
Perhaps the most striking paragraph asserts the preeminence of sound in transmitting the magical inner world of feeling. This particular paragraph must have resonated very strongly with the musical side of Liszt’s nature:
“It is in sounds that nature has placed the strongest expression of the romantic character; it is above all to the sense of hearing that one can render perceptible, in a few strokes and in an energetic way, places and extraordinary things. Smells cause rapid and immense, but vague perceptions; those of sight seem to interest the mind more than the heart: we admire what we see, but we feel what we hear. The voice of a beloved woman will be even more beautiful than her features; the sounds of sublime places will make a deeper and more lasting impression than their forms. I have never seen a picture of the Alps which made them present to me as can a true Alpine melody.”
It is as salutary a sentiment for a musician as one could possibly hope for, and really the heart of much of Liszt’s philosophy. I think it also explains why Liszt includes so many quotations and images, and poetic titles with his pieces. They are the starting places, indicating the door to the expressive world that only the music can fully open. They are not crutches for musical ideas that could not otherwise stand on their own.
“Le mal du pays” is in a very odd, episodic structure, with a strong sense of being a written down improvisation. This is partly created by the frequent pauses and hesitations, the frequent changes of tempo, and by the way melodic ideas gradually take shape through altered repetitions. Take the 2nd idea after the Ranz des vaches (mm. 8-18). It’s hardly a melody at all, but instead has a dreamlike succession of disparate elements, all based on the same melodic shapes, but with wildly different moods, textures and speeds.
Even after this, when we finally reach something that is recognizably melodic in outline, with an actual 8-bar phrase in the key of G-sharp minor (mm. 20-27), we find that it is still not exactly continuous. Liszt pauses after the first 4-bars, makes a left turn and heads into the parallel major key G# major, then after another 2 bars, another hesitation, and a slightly more agitated idea in G# minor, he ends on an open ended half-candece.
Instead of continuing this new idea in any way, Liszt breaks off and repeats the Ranz des vaches, while making a disorienting modulation to G minor. The 2nd time through these ideas, the Ranz des vaches and the improvisation repeat exactly, but he expands the last part of the 2nd theme into a climax, which again abruptly breaks off mid-phrase (mm. 53-60). The final statement of the Ranz des vaches in in the bass register, and is followed by a wonderfully inconclusive final cadence, in which Liszt replaces the typical penultimate dominant 7th harmony with a French augmented 6th chord.
It’s an astonishing poetic conception, both moving and mysterious-just like the emotions it is intended to conjure up for the listener.
My full translation of the excerpt chosen by Liszt to preface this piece, from Senacour's "Obermann:"
OF ROMANTIC EXPRESSION AND THE RANZ DES VACHES.
Romanticism seduces vivid and flowery imaginations; romanticism alone suffices for deep souls, for true sensibility. Nature is full of romantic effects in simple lands; a long history of culture destroys them in older lands, especially in the flat lands where man easily subjugates all to himself.
Romantic effects are the accents of a language which not all men know, and which becomes foreign in many places. One soon ceases to hear them when one no longer lives with them; and yet this romantic harmony is the only one which preserves in our hearts the colors of youth and the freshness of life. The man of society no longer feels these effects-too far removed from his habits, he ends up saying: What does it matter to me? It is like the gradual dying away of a fire attenuated over time by a slow poison; our man of society finds himself an old man in the prime of life, and the springs of life are dry in him, although he retains the outward semblance of a man.
But you, whom the vulgar believe to be no different than themselves, because you live with simplicity, because you have inspiration without the pretension of spirituality, or simply because you are seen to live, and because, like him, you eat and you sleep; primitive men, thrown here and there in this century of vanity, to preserve the touch of natural things, you recognize each other, you understand each other in a language that the crowd does not know, when the October sun appears in the fogs of the yellow wood; when a trickle of water flows and falls in a closed meadow of trees, at moonset; when under the summer sky, on a cloudless day, a woman's voice sings in the mid-afternoon, at a distance, among the walls and roofs of a great city.
Imagine a plain of clear, white water. It is vast, but circumscribed; its oblong and slightly circular shape extends towards the winter sunset. High peaks, majestic chains close it on three sides. You are sitting on the slope of the mountain, above the northern shore, against which the waves lap. Perpendicular rocks are behind you; they rise to the region of the clouds; the sad pole wind has never blown on this happy shore. To your left the mountains open, a quiet valley stretches in their depths, a torrent descends from the snowy peaks which close it; and when the morning sun appears between the frozen peaks, on the mists, when voices from the mountainside reveal the location of the chalets, above the meadows still in the shade, it is the awakening of a primitive land, it is a monument of our unknown destinies!
Here are the first nocturnal moments; the hour of rest and sublime sadness. The valley is smoky, it begins to darken. Towards noon the lake is dark as night; the rocks which enclose it are a gloomy expanse under the icy dome which surmounts them, and which seems to retain the light of day in its frosts. Its last fires yellow the many chestnut trees on the wild rocks; they pass in long lines under the tall spires of the Alpine fir trees; they brown the mountains; they kindle the snows; they kindle the air; and the waveless water, shining with light and confused with the heavens, becomes infinite like them and still purer, more ethereal, more beautiful. Its calm astonishes, its limpidity deceives, the airy splendor it mirrors seems to delve its profundity; and under these mountains separated from the world and suspended in the air, you find at your feet the emptiness of the heavens and the immensity of the world. This is a time of awe and oblivion. One no longer knows where the sky is, where the mountains are, or what supports us; one can no longer find balance, there is no longer a horizon; ideas are transfigured, sensations mysterious: you are apart from everyday life. And when the shadow has covered this valley of water, when the eye no longer discerns either objects or distances, when the evening wind has disturbed the waves, then, towards the west, the end of the lake remains alone lit with a pale glow; but all that the mountains surround is but an indiscernible abyss, and in the midst of the darkness and the silence you hear, a thousand feet below you, endlessly agitated waves, which come and go and do not cease, which quiver on the beach at equal intervals, which are engulfed by the rocks, which break on the bank, and whose sounds seem to resound in a long murmur in the invisible abyss.
It is in sounds that nature has placed the strongest expression of the romantic character; it is above all to the sense of hearing that one can render perceptible, in a few strokes and in an energetic way, places and extraordinary things. Smells cause rapid and immense, but vague perceptions; those of sight seem to interest the mind more than the heart: we admire what we see, but we feel what we hear. The voice of a beloved woman will be even more beautiful than her features; the sounds of sublime places will make a deeper and more lasting impression than their forms. I have never seen a picture of the Alps which made them present to me as can a truly Alpine melody.
The Ranz des vaches not only brings back memories, it paints. I know Rousseau said the opposite, but I think he was wrong. This effect is not imaginary; it has happened that two people, separately perusing the plates of the Tableaux pittoresques de la Suisse, have both said, on seeing the Grimsel: "Here is where one surely must hear the Ranz des Vaches." If it is expressed with truth rather than skill, if the one who plays it feels it fully, the first sounds place us in the high valleys, near the bare rocks of a russet gray, under the cold sky, under the blazing sun. We are on the curve of rounded peaks covered with pastures. We are penetrated by stillness and the grandeur of the place; one sees the calm tread of the cows and the measured movement of their great bells, near the clouds, in the gently sloping expanse from the crest of immovable granite to the ruined granite of the snowy ravines. The winds quiver austerely in the distant larches; we can discern the roiling of the torrent hidden in the precipices that it has dug over long centuries. These solitary noises in space are followed by the hasty and heavy accents of the Küheren (Ranz des vaches), a nomadic expression of a pleasure without gaiety, a joy of the mountains. The songs cease; the man walks away; the sound of bells passes over the larches; one only hears the crash of rolling pebbles, and the interrupted fall of the trees that the torrent pushes towards the valleys. The wind brings or takes away these alpine sounds; and, when he falls silent, everything seems cold, motionless and dead. It is the domain of the man who is in no hurry. He comes out from under the long, low roof, which the heavy stones insure against the storms; if the sun is burning, if the wind is strong, if the thunder rolls under his feet, he does not know it. He walks on the side where the cows should be: there they are; he calls them, they gather, they approach successively, and he returns with the same slowness, laden with milk destined for the plains he will never know. The cows stop, they ruminate; there is no more visible movement, there are no more men. The air is cold, the wind has ceased with the evening light; there remains only the gleam of ancient snows, and the fall of the waters whose wild rustling, rising from the abysses, seems to add to the silent permanence of the high peaks, and of the glaciers, and of the night.
Wonderful performance, thank you for sharing it with us! I really like that you let the rests with fermatas breathe. Liszt's romantic/modernist fragmentation really needs the kind of approach you take to fully connect with the listener. Cheers, again!
You've given us a lot to read this week! And you've given us a sublime performance of a piano work by Liszt which for me, my first time of hearing, leaves me (for once!) a little lost for words, but truly fascinated by your written commentary and profoundly touched by this music which succeeded in evoking an emotional response in me that has taken me by surprise. Just amazing. (But, if I'm honest, not the same without your reassuring voice and smiling face and beguiling eyes to guide us along the musical journeys you so meticulously prepare for us. That aspect I missed very much . . . but thank you - and B R A V O !)
Thanks Graham! No worries, I will be back onscreen with commentary later on. This video was made under a bit of time constraint.
@@TheIndependentPianist You're forgiven!
Thank you. Beautiful performance and nice analysis. This movement makes much more sense to me now. Even without your expository intro, the performance + score + analysis is a nice format. Please continue.
Greetings Cole! I've been following your videos for a while now. Would you be interested in doing a video on music careers? I'd be hooked onto that...cheers.
Yes, I would very much like to talk about some possible ways to use music to make a living. Maybe that will come up soon. Thanks for the suggestion!
I really appreciate how you brought out the operatic qualities and also didn't try to smooth over the harmonic interests in this piece and also how you really let it arise. So rare. Thankyou. I'm always fascinated with Liszt's interests in memory and nostalgia and regret like in the Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth pieces and Andante Lagrimoso and Romance Oubilee how he reenacts and explores the mental processes in his works. Very fascinating. Thankyou as always!
Hi - new subscriber here. This is one of the few videos on your site without a spoken commentary. Curious as to the rationale.
Simply time constraints. That week I was traveling, and didn't have time to set up and record myself before Friday!
OK, makes sense!
Thank you for your performance and analysis. I always found it very poetic that the final statement of the Ranz des vaches theme is once again in E minor, but Liszt keeps the key signature of B minor. (It’s a detail which is only there for the benefit of the performer, of course.)
Yes, absolutely, I agree that Liszt deliberately ended the piece with the "wrong" combo of home key and key signature, as a poetic allusion to homesickness.
How interesting-I hadn't really thought about it before. I wonder to what extent this was intended as a kind of "cipher."
The start kinda sounds like the starting notes of nauge gris
It does have a passing similarity. The similarity in style is also quite striking-although Nuages gris is even more disparate and evanescent of course.
This is great.
I wonder if you’re counting in your head while you play? Or you just feel it?
It's a bit of both. Counting is such a habit by now that I find myself subdividing and keeping an internal beat without having to think about it. But I also choose moments to adjust the underlying beat for the sake of expressive freedom as well. Thanks for watching!